Odysseus: The Fall Challenges Nolan's Epic

PLUS: Mira Murati's Inkling model drops and the Met's new AI tool reveals hidden art connections

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July 17, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

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An AI-made feature film just landed in theaters’ shadow — timed almost exactly to Christopher Nolan’s $250 million adaptation of the same myth. Odysseus: The Fall cost a fraction of that budget and leaned entirely on tools like Kling and Nanobanana to get to the screen.

It’s a pointed test of Nolan’s own recent claim that younger audiences are rejecting AI slop outright. Will viewers give a fully AI-generated epic a fair look, or is Hollywood’s AI experiment still stuck in the uncanny valley?

Today in AI:

  • Fountain O’s AI film rivals Nolan’s $250M Odyssey

  • Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines drops its first model

  • The Met’s new AI tool maps hidden art connections

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What’s new? Fountain O unveiled Odysseus: The Fall, a 135-minute feature film generated almost entirely with AI tools, timed to release alongside Christopher Nolan’s $250 million adaptation of the same story.

What matters?

  • Director Ash Koosha built the film for a mid-five-figure budget, using Kling for video generation alongside Google’s Nanobanana for imagery and Claude for script editing.

  • The release deliberately overlaps with Nolan’s The Odyssey, which stars Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway and opens in theaters July 17.

  • The timing follows Nolan’s own remarks that younger moviegoers are “utterly rejecting” AI slop, setting up a real-world test of whether audiences will watch AI-made cinema at all.

Why it matters?

Odysseus: The Fall won’t out-earn a $250 million blockbuster, but it doesn’t need to — it’s proof a small team can now finish a feature-length film with consumer AI tools most readers can try today. The real test comes this weekend, when both versions of the same story reach audiences at once.

GUIDE

What’s new? Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released Inkling, its first open-weight AI model, after roughly 17 months of development.

What matters?

  • Inkling is a 975 billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that activates just 41 billion parameters per task, trained on 45 trillion tokens of text, image, audio, and video.

  • The company admits Inkling isn’t “the strongest overall model available today, open or closed” — the pitch is customization, not benchmark wins.

  • Full weights are downloadable, and the model is already live for fine-tuning on Thinking Machines’ Tinker platform, the company’s model-customization tool.

Why it matters?

Most open-weight models this year have come out of China — GLM, DeepSeek, Kimi — making Inkling one of the few serious American counterweights. Murati is betting developers will pick a model they can freely reshape over one that simply tops a leaderboard.

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What’s new? Google Arts & Culture and The Metropolitan Museum of Art launched Art Aura, an interactive AI tool built on Gemini that lets anyone drag artworks, styles, or phrases into a digital space to surface hidden connections across the museum’s collection.

What matters?

  • The tool draws on more than 200,000 digitized objects from The Met’s collection, built during a six-month residency where technologist Julia Daser tested prototypes directly in the museum’s galleries.

  • Art Aura reveals personalized thematic connections between artworks based on what a visitor drags into it, turning browsing into a guided discovery session.

  • The launch marks 15 years of collaboration between Google Arts & Culture and The Met, alongside a new landing page featuring 50 curated digital stories about the collection.

Why it matters?

Museums have spent a decade digitizing their collections; Art Aura shows what happens once AI can actually help people navigate all that material. Anyone curious about art history can try it today without setting foot in New York.

Everything else in AI

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ChatGPT shows how to turn a Figma file into working code — connect the Figma app, point ChatGPT at a specific frame, and prompt it to match the design down to spacing and responsiveness.

Creatorfield turns a single prompt into more than 100 short videos, auto-cutting, captioning, and formatting each one for different social platforms.

God of Prompt packages prompt libraries, templates, and tutorials into one bundle for turning ChatGPT and Midjourney skills into a side income.

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